Wednesday, 29 January 2014

The application of formal tools (e.g. from logic, rational choice theory, natural language semantics, AI) to the analysis of ethical concepts and theories is a rapidly growing field of research. It has shed new light on a variety of concepts that are central to ethical theory, such as freedom, responsibility, values, norms, and conventions. For information about previous Formal Ethics conferences, please take a look at http://2012.formalethics.net or http://www.philos.rug.nl/FEW/. The program, tutorial, and working session links there will provide some indication of the breadth of possible topics and formal approaches.

We invite submissions to Formal Ethics 2014, to be held at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. The workshop aims to bring together researchers who are employing formal tools to address questions in ethics and/or political philosophy. We encourage graduate students and members of underrepresented groups to submit to this conference.

Authors should send an extended abstract (1000 words max, pdf or postscript format) suitable for anonymous review, together with their name, institutional affiliation(s) and current position(s) in the body of the email to the Organizing Committee organization@formalethics.netwith the subject 'Submission' in the email topic.

Submission topicsSubmissions in all areas of formal ethics, broadly construed, are welcome. For Formal Ethics 2014, submissions related to intergenerational ethics, such as population ethics, environmental ethics, and intergenerational justice as well as happiness and freedom are particularly welcome.

Important DatesDeadline for submissions: March 1, 2014Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2014Conference: May 30 and 31, 2014

Institutional SupportFormal Ethics 2014 is supported by the Erasmus Institute of Philosophy and Economics (EIPE) and the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization (EHERO) and the Marie Curie programme (FP7) of the European Union.

Thursday, 23 January 2014

EXPLANATION BEYOND CAUSATION

LMU Munich,
23-24 October 2014www.lmu.de/ebc2014The presently received view regarding the question “what is a scientific
explanation?” is the causal model of explanation. According to this model, the
sciences explain by providing information about causes and causal mechanisms.
However, in the recent literature, an increasing number of philosophers argue
that the explanatory practices in the sciences are considerably richer than the
causal model suggests. These philosophers argue that there are non-causal
explanations that cannot be accommodated by the causal model. Case studies of
non-causal explanations come in a surprisingly diverse variety: for instance,
the non-causal character of scientific explanations is based on the explanatory
use of non-causal laws, purely mathematical facts, symmetry principles,
inter-theoretic relations, renormalization group methods, and so forth.
However, if there are non-causal ways of explaining, then the causal model
cannot be the whole story about scientific explanation. The goal of the
conference is to shed light on, by and large, unexplored philosophical terrain:
that is, to develop a philosophical account of various aspects of non-causal
explanations in the sciences.

We invite submissions of extended abstracts of 1000 words for contributed talks
by 1st March 2014. Decisions will be made by 15th March 2014.

Thursday, 16 January 2014

IMPRECISE PROBABILITIES IN STATISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY

Imprecise probabilities offer a model of uncertainty that is more general, less idealised than the standard precise probability framework. Imprecise probabilities are receiving increasing attention in statistics (as well as in artificial intelligence and in economics). Recently, there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in these generalised models of uncertainty. The aim of this workshop is to bring together philosophers and statisticians to see what we can learn from each other. We are sure that such interdisciplinary collaboration will be valuable both to philosophers and to statisticians. Topics on which we might expect fruitful discussions include:

updating imprecise probabilities and dilation;

foundations of imprecise probabilities;

procedures for eliciting imprecise probabilities;

decision making with imprecise probabilities.

We invite submissions of extended abstracts of 1500 words for contributed talks by 1st March 2013. Decisions will be made by 15th March 2014.

Submissions should be prepared for anonymous review. Initial evaluation will be done anonymously. The final program will be selected with an eye towards maintaining diversity, so graduate students, people outside the tenure track, women, and members of underrepresented minorities are particularly encouraged to submit papers.

Some funding has been secured to subsidize travel for student and non-tenure-track authors.

Please send full papers as an attachment to 2014few@gmail.com by Friday, January 31, 2014. Identifying information about the author(s) (including obvious self-citations) should be removed from the body of the paper, but the name (and any other relevant information) should be included in the text of the e-mail. Final selection of the program will be made by March 31, 2014.

Wednesday, 8 January 2014

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) invites applications for visiting fellowships for one to three months in the academic year 2014/15 (15 October 2014 to 15 February 2015 or 15 April to 15 July 2015) intended for advanced Ph.D. students (“Junior Fellowships") and postdocs or faculty (“Senior Fellowships"). Candidates should work in general philosophy of science, the philosophy of one of the special sciences, formal epistemology, or social epistemology and have a commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative work. To apply, send your application (ideally everything in one pdf file) to philscifellows.MCMP@lrz.uni-muenchen.de with the subject “Junior Fellowship Application” or “Senior Fellowship Application”. Candidates should include a letter of interest (which also indicates the period of the planned stay), a CV, and a project outline of no more than 1000 words. Candidates for a Junior Fellowship should additionally supply one letter of recommendation. We offer a tax-free stipend of 800 Euro/month for junior fellows and 1200 Euro/month for senior fellows to partly cover additional expenses such as housing and transportation to and from Munich. It is also possible to stay for a longer period (e.g. if you are on a sabbatical), but stipends will be for maximally three months.

We also encourage groups of two to four researchers, which may also include scientists, to jointly apply for fellowships (“Research Group Fellowships") to work on an innovative collaborative project from the above-mentioned fields which is of relevance for the research done at the MCMP and which ideally includes a member of the MCMP as a collaborator. To apply, send your application (if possible everything in one pdf file) to philscifellows.MCMP@lrz.uni-muenchen.de with the subject “Research Group Fellowship Application”. Interested groups should include a letter of interest (which also indicates the period of the planned stay), a CV of each group member, and a project outline of no more than 2000 words that also includes information about the intended output of the project. We offer a tax-free stipend of 800 Euro/month for junior group members and 1200 Euro/month for senior group members to partly cover additional expenses such as housing and transportation to and from Munich. It is also possible to stay for a longer period, but stipends will be for maximally three months.

Monday, 6 January 2014

Formal/mathematical philosophy is a well-established
approach within philosophical inquiry, having its friends as well as its foes.
Now, even though I am very much a formal-approaches-enthusiast, I believe that
fundamental methodological questions tend not to receive as much attention as
they deserve within this tradition. In particular, a key question which is
unfortunately not asked often enough is: what counts as a ‘good’ formalization?
How do we know that a given proposed formalization is adequate, so that the
insights provided by it are indeed insights about
the target phenomenon in question? In recent years, the question of what counts as adequate formalization seems to be for the most part a ‘Swiss obsession’,
with the thought-provoking work of Georg Brun, and Michael Baumgartner & Timm Lampert. But even these authors seem to me to restrict the question to a
limited notion of formalization, as translation of pieces of natural language
into some formalism. (I argued in chapter 3 of my book Formal Languages in Logic that this is not the best way to think
about formalization.)

However, some of the pioneers in formal/mathematical
approaches to philosophical questions did pay at least some attention to the
issue of what counts as an adequate formalization. In this post, I want to
discuss how Tarski and Carnap approached the issue, hoping to convince more
‘formal philosophers’ to go back to these questions. (I also find the ‘squeezing
argument’ framework developed by Kreisel particularly illuminating, but will
leave it out for now, for reasons of space.)

Both in his paper on truth and in his paper on
logical consequence (in the 1930s), Tarski started out with an informal notion and then sought
to develop an appropriate formal framework for it. In the case of truth, the
starting point was the correspondence conception of truth, which he claimed
dated back to Aristotle. In the case of logical consequence, he was somewhat
less precise and referred to the ‘common’ or ‘everyday’ notion of logical
consequence. (I’ve argued elsewhere that this is a problematic idea.)

These two conceptual starting points allowed him to
formulate what he described as ‘conditions of material adequacy’ for the formal
accounts. (He also formulated criteria of formal correctness, which pertain to
the internal exactness of the formal theory.) In the case of truth, the basic condition of material adequacy was the famous T-schema; in the case of
logical consequence, the properties of necessary truth-preservation and of
validity-preserving schematic substitution. (In my SEP entry on medieval theories of consequence, I’ve done a bit of conceptual genealogy to unearth
where these two conditions for logical consequence came from.)

Unsurprisingly, the formal theories he then went on to
develop both passed the test of material adequacy he had formulated himself.
But there is nothing ad hoc about this, since the conceptual core of the
notions he was after was presumably captured in these conditions, which thus
could serve as conceptual ‘guides’ for the formulation of the formal theories.
Indeed, the fact of formulating conceptual/informal but nevertheless precise desiderata is one of the
philosophical strengths of Tarski’s analyses both of truth and of logical
consequence.

Carnap’s analysis of what counts as adequate formalization
can be found in Chapter 1 of Logical
Foundations of Probability (1950), namely in his famous exposition of the
notion of explication:

The task of explication consists in transforming a given
more or less inexact concept into an exact one or, rather, in replacing the
ﬁrst by the second. We call the given concept (or the term used for it) the explicandum,
and the exact concept proposed to take the place of the ﬁrst (or the term
proposed for it) the explicatum.

Carnap then goes on to formulate four requirements for an
adequate explication: (1) similarity to the explicandum, (2) exactness, (3)
fruitfulness, (4) simplicity. Exactness and simplicity seem to be purely
internal criteria, going in the direction of Tarski’s criteria of formal
correctness. Similarity to the explicandum seems to me to come very close to
what Tarski refers to as ‘conditions of material adequacy’, namely that the
formal explicatum should reflect the conceptual core of the informal
explicandum in question. But fruitfulness, which is both the least developed
and most interesting of Carnap’s desiderata, seems to me to be a true novelty
with respect to Tarski’s discussion in terms of material adequacy and formal
correctness, and one that makes the whole thing significantly more complicated
but also significantly more interesting.

As I’ve argued in a talk at the Carnap on Logic conference in
Munich last year, Carnap’s concepts of similarity and fruitfulness are in fact
somewhat in tension with one another, in the sense that a formalization
(explication) can be viewed as all the more fruitful if it reveals aspects of
the informal concept which were not visible ‘to the naked eye’. So what Carnap
added to the Tarskian framework is the idea that the goal of a formalization is
not only to capture exactly what is already explicit in the informal concept in
question. To be sure, Carnap himself does not say that much about what he
understands under fruitfulness, and seems to focus in particular on the
explicatum’s capacity to generate ‘many universal statements’. But it seems to
me that the Carnapian notion of the fruitfulness of a formalization can be
developed in other interesting directions, in particular in the more
epistemological/cognitive direction of formalization as a tool for discovery. (I’m supposed to write a paper for the special
issue ensuing from the Carnap workshop, and the plan is to develop these ideas
more fully.)

Be that as it may, I hope to have made it clear that both
Tarski and Carnap offer excellent starting points for (much-needed) sustained discussions
of what counts as adequate formalization, and more generally of the
methodological aspects of applying formal/mathematical methods to philosophical
questions.